Posts Tagged “duck”

It happens a couple of times a year. Some ad salesman makes it through the phone screen into the ear of an impressionable person and suddenly we’re discussing advertising with in-flight magazines or worse yet, in-flight audio infotainment. Although the demographics of people why fly might be attractive to some businesses, the odds of somebody consuming this in-flight media and retaining any of it to an actionable place seem vanishingly small. I’ve sung this song before. Well, my lucky number came up yesterday when I made a point of carrying the entire May issue of Delta’s Sky magazine off the flight with me. After all, somebody had done the sudoku and I polished off one of the crossword puzzles. Why did I take the magazine? Almost entirely for this, which by the way is not paid advertising.

It was part of a feature on the fashionable shopping strip of Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale, FL. A dark chocolate duck. How cool is that? Even Lake Champlain Chocolates doesn’t have that. And the little tin, precious! As I write this I note that the chocoduck bears a peculiar resemblance to an antique silver bank we had around the house when I was little. It kinda creeped me out, actually.

Anyway, so I got home and scanned this page and set off to the Galler website (type it in yourself, I’m not giving them a link) and discovered that there’s no sign of the chocolately canard at all. No picture, no mention in the catalog. It’s the May issue of the magazine, how often do these things change? Not that I really want a chocolate duck, but I would feel better knowing that there really is one.

A few searches later, I found some feeble substitutes such as the loathsome white chocolate duckie embedded in the “nirvana chocolates summer gift basket.” I think not. But I also found evidence of somebody thinking outside the box with the application of Vahlrona chocolate to actual duck breasts. The link to the full recipe is a tease, but especially after MoleCanolli, I’m quite curious. (More on MoleCanolli soon, I’m still compiling my notes.)

From the excellent virtual pages of Strange Maps comes this ducky item.

On January 10 [1992], a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Apparently these buoyant and nearly indestructible little quackers have helped scientists track ocean currents and are showing up on beaches on several continents, and have become collectors items of a weird sort.  Here’s a link to the turgid wikipedia entry on the Friendly Floatees.  Keep your eyes peeled at the beach this summer.

Why is there a giant duck outside Cambridge City Hall right now?

A. Cambridge opens its gates to admit the Trojan Duck
B. A giant rubber duck admonishes Cantabrigians to reduce litter to keep local waters clean
C. The city of Cambridge finally recognizes Duck Day as a city holiday

answer after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

You think I’m making this up? Check the menu, and the photo evidence from my bud RoninOtter’s photostream: Kaffir limeduck salad at Oishii. Mixed greens and shredded duck with pine nuts and mustard jalapeno and kaffir lime vinagrette. Yum.

We were seated in the lower-level dining room, where I’d never been before, but it was as tranquil and comfortable as the upstairs. An unremarkable party of five in the middle of the week, we were visited by the chef at least three times. I hope it wasn’t because we were making too much noise. We were definitely having too much fun.

As we approach Thanksgiving season, there’s much talk of poultry, from the traditionally pardoned presidential turkey to the migration of Canada Geese to the ever trendy and and labor-intensive turducken to that excellent low-cholesterol portmanteau, torfurkey.

I was checking on my site today when I suddenly noticed something terribly wrong with the header graphic. I’ve fixed it since, and the headers rotate so you might not see this one above, so here’s a bit of it below - do you see the problem?

Look closely at the bird. That’s not a duck up there. It’s a goose.  Impostor!  This isn’t limegoose.com - how could this have happened, you ask? Well, it goes back to the migration to WordPress when I decided to bust out my 1337 Photoshop ski11z and create some new headers. Being a city boy, I chose not to wrangle an actual duck onto the flatbed scanner, and instead found the convenient custom shape tool palette…

…and promptly fat-fingered the choice between duck (left) and goose (right) and never looked back. Here’s the re-worked header with a proper duck silhouette:

I’ve worked on it further since, and if you don’t see it up top, reload a couple of times and you should see the proper poultry pixels atop the page. As Cibo Matto said, you got to know your chicken.